Get ready for a new, much more powerful Apple TV

The current Apple TV is nearly two years old. That’s why it’s not surprising to learn that Apple has been working on a new device for a while. This weekend, an upcoming build of iOS 11 for the next iPhone was leaked and contains a ton of information about unreleased products, including the next Apple TV.

A previous leak of the HomePod firmware already indicated that Apple was working on an Apple TV with 4K video support. The new device could also support various high-dynamic range standards, such as Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Hybrid Log-Gamma. The company could announce 4K videos on the iTunes Store as well as in the Netflix app.

And now, Steve Troughton-Smith discovered some of the technical specs of the next Apple TV. According to him, the media player is going to receive a major performance gain with a lot more computing power and RAM:

Apple first shipped the A10 with the iPhone 7 last year. The A10X is an updated version of this chip optimized for the most recent iPad Pro. It’s a surprisingly fast system-on-a-chip. It’s sometimes even faster than a MacBook.

The current Apple TV sports an A8 system-on-a-chip, the one that was developed for the iPhone 6. It’s a bit hard to grasp Apple’s progress when it comes to silicon. According to Geekbench, when you compare the A10X with the A8, the A10X is 1.7 times faster for single-core tasks, 2.8 times faster for multi-core tasks and 5.7 times faster for Metal-focused, GPU-intensive tasks. It’s a huge improvement overall.

This upgrade in particular is going to feel great when you’re trying to stream 4K videos. Skipping forward and backward should feel snappy. And your videos will never buffer, even if you’re trying to play 4K videos with 60 frames per second (the new iPhones should let you shoot 4K videos with 60 FPS).

In addition to a faster system-on-a-chip, Apple could also include 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB. This way, you’ll be able to cache a good chunk of the movie or TV show you’re currently streaming.

Apple could announce the new Apple TV as early as tomorrow during its annual September press conference. The company could also use this opportunity to showcase some new video games running on the Apple TV as it’s quite a capable device now.